Receipt OCR for Expense Automation

Receipt Scanning applications for automating expense reporting and other accounting processes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

Simple Software has several solutions for capturing transactional data from receipts with OCR and integrating with your accounting software, drastically reducing the cost of expense report processing.

Complete AP expense scanning solutions with direct API integration or Robotic Process Automation to integrate with any system.

Simple Software has three categories of automated receipt processing software depending on the volume and type of receipts being processed, the available technical resources at your company, and the data entry requirements of your accounting software.

SimpleIndex AP Invoice ScanningThe first category provides affordable expense automation for small businesses. These are designed to quickly capture basic transactional data, like Vendor, Quantaties, Date and Total, using simple pattern matching. Our SimpleIndex receipt processing software gives you the easiest and most affordable solution available.

The second category uses artificial intelligence and machine learning models to extract data from a wide variety of expense documents with minimal setup and training required.

Receipt Scanning

The ABBYY Vantage data capture platform is an example of this type of receipt automation software. Cloud OCR APIs like Google Vision and Amazon Textract also use the ML strategy for expenses. SimpleIndex Cloud OCR provides an out-of-the-box receipt automation solution using Textract that requires no custom coding.

The third category combines pre-trained machine learning models with highly customizable data capture software platforms that let you design solutions that fully automate the most complex expense data entry processes. These applications have the ability to add and train custom receipt fields, capture complex line item data, and use scripts to automatically correct and normalize data to match your ERP system’s requirements. ABBYY FlexiCapture, IRIS Xtract, and Grooper are examples of this third software category.

AP Invoice Scanning

Cloud OCR vs Sunshine OCR


VS.

Cloud OCRWith the development of Cloud Computing, more and more OCR solutions started to move processing to the cloud. There are several major Cloud OCR solutions like AWS Textract (from Amazon), Azure AI Vision (from Microsoft), Google Cloud Vision AI, as well as more specialized solutions like ABBYY Vantage.

These days it is much harder to find an OCR data capture solution that is not fully or partly cloud-based.

Sunshine OCR, On Premise OCR,Sunshine Software or Sunshine OCR refers to on-premise Optical Character Recognition software that requires no internet connection to operate. Since there is no Cloud involved, we are calling it Sunshine Software to shine a light on the advantages of avoiding the Cloud.

We call it “Sunshine” because it’s catchy and makes us smile. But also because there is no good marketing term for this type of software. Before the “Cloud” became popular, it was known as simply as “Software.” After the development of Cloud Computing, it has been referred to as On-Prem, On-Premise, On-Site, Offline, Local, Native, Self-Hosted, In-House and other terms, but none of them highlight the benefits it has over the Cloud like Sunshine Software.

Cloud OCR or Sunshine OCR?

Cloud OCRIn the ever-evolving landscape of technology, businesses are faced with critical decisions regarding the deployment of software. Two prominent models, cloud-based and sunshine-based (on-premise) software, offer distinct approaches to meeting organizational needs. Understanding the differences between these models is essential for making informed decisions aligned with business goals and requirements.

Key Characteristics

Cloud-Based OCR Software:

Cloud OCR software operates on remote servers accessible over the internet. This model offers unparalleled scalability, allowing businesses to […]

Aviation and Marine Fuel Invoices

Aviation and Marine fuel invoice processing has a number of data capture and normalization requirements that make them very hard to automate without specialized knowledge and customized business rules.

Our team has implemented aviation, marine, and land fuel transportation invoice automation projects, with some of the top global energy services companies. We have extensive knowledge of these types of invoices and the way that they need to be processed to ensure that the myriad of taxes and fees are captured and applied to the correct fueling.

What Makes Aviation and Marine Invoice Processing So Complex?

  • Multiple taxes from multiple jurisdictions apply to each transaction. Excise tax, Environmental tax, LUST tax, VAT, etc.
  • Additional fees like Airport, Storage, Intoplane, Flowage, Fuel Surcharge, etc.
  • Different vendors use different descriptions for each tax and fee.
  • Invoices with multiple itemized fuel transactions but a single summary of taxes and fees that must be applied to each fueling proportionally.
  • Sometimes the same data appears in the header, and other times in the line items, sub-tables, or footers.
  • Aviation and Marine are international businesses, so handling multiple languages and currencies, exchange rate calculation, and currency conversions must be performed.
  • Since the price of fuel changes constantly, slight changes must be accommodated within acceptable tolerance.

Achieving Total Automation

Other invoice solutions capture data only as it appears on the invoice. While some normalization or mapping to known item IDs can be done, it is rare that the data can be imported and matched to a fuel order without additional manual steps. Unless the data being imported matches the expected data line by line, someone must manually reconcile the differences.

When orders are placed for a single uplift, but the vendor sends a daily or weekly […]

Digitech Systems OCR

Digitech Systems creates an award-winning digitization and content management software and cloud services that deliver Any Document, Anywhere, Anytime®, organizations of all sizes now securely and effectively extract, manage and automate their business information.

The PaperVision and ImageSilo brands are used by thousands of businesses worldwide from global conglomerates to Main Street to help teams pave the path to more meaningful work by transforming how they handle digital files, processes, documents, and more.

Starting with PaperFlow digitization software, subsequent years brought on-premise information management (PaperVision Enterprise, 1998), the world’s first cloud Enterprise Content Management system (ImageSilo, 1999), business process automation (PaperVision Enterprise WorkFlow, 2002), intelligent data capture (PaperVision Capture, 2009), and AI-enabled forms processing (PaperVision Forms Magic™, 2016). The PaperVision®.com cloud-based information management system was introduced in 2020. These products provide unprecedented ease-of-use and architectural flexibility, while balancing fully featured products with a sensible price/performance ratio and legendary customer service.

PaperVision Enterprise performs dependable electronic document management to automate office environments, conserve paper, time, money, and provide peace of mind. Retrieval solutions provide enterprise scalability and functionality with advanced features that enhance your efficiency and protect corporate data. Electronic information is retrieved instantly with our user-friendly graphical interface that displays a complete overview of all your available projects. View, manipulate, print, fax, export, and e-mail documents directly from your PC. On-premise installation or cloud hosted services available.

PaperVision Direct Scan, import, index, and organize paper documents using your existing scanners and multi-function devices (MFD) to create convenient digital files and securely upload them to the cloud. Start scanning documents right at your desk! Turn any vulnerable paper document into a useful digital file that can be securely managed in your PaperVision.com cloud service.

PaperVision Capture Forms Magic adds handwriting […]

SimpleIndex Cloud OCR

SimpleIndex Cloud OCR adds Amazon AWS Textract OCR to any SimpleIndex workstation or server license.

Textract capabilities include the most accurate OCR and handprint recognition available, automatic form field detection, accounts payable invoice and receipt processing.

Amazon Textract is only available as an API that requires custom programming to make it work. SimpleIndex turns it into a complete document and data capture application designed for easy batch processing on a workstation or server.

Requires an AWS account. Standard Textract transaction fees will apply.

You can learn more about Amazon Textract integration in to SimpleIndex here.

Amazon Textract API

Automatically extract handwriting, plain text or form data from any document using the world’s largest OCR machine learning model based on billions of sample documents.

Amazon Textract is a cloud OCR service that automatically detects and extracts text and data from scanned documents and PDF files. It goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to also identify the contents of fields in forms and information stored in tables.

Amazon Textract API also lets you implement OCR in your RPA workflows. UiPath and other bots offer connectors that let you include Textract OCR into your RPA process.

Textract is not a “ready-to-use” product. It requires programing skills, experience with AWS systems and decent amount of coding to implement it into your systems, especially once you add user interfaces for scanning and data validation.

Simple Software developers have the necessary skills and experience to integrate Textract into your custom applications. Contact us or click the Request a Quote button to get a proposal for your custom application development project.

Simple Software also offers the ready-to-use SimpleIndex application that incorporates Textract into a fully-featured scanning, indexing and document processing application.

You can learn more about Amazon Textract into SimpleIndex here.

ABBYY Vantage

ABBYY Vantage leverages AI machine learning and a huge library of document “skills” to provide out-of-the-box data capture for all kinds of documents.

Vantage provides a simple way to implement new data capture processes without the need for programmers.

It takes the FlexiCapture platform, hosts it in the cloud, and dramatically simplifies the interface. The thousands of settings you can use with FlexiCapture to build templates are managed by the AI, giving you a simple point and click interface to create new document capture workflows.

The “Skills” library gives you pre-configured capture workflows for hundreds of the most common documents. Simply connect them to your import and export destinations and you are ready to go, saving you hours or even days of development time.

Robotic Process Automation

Introducing Robotic Process Automation

RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation and it represents a new approach to business automation that helps minimize the technical hurdles required for implementing new workflows.

Robotic Process Automation of Data Entry

Traditional business process automations rely on application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow systems to exchange data. This approach has two main drawbacks:

  1. The application vendor must make those APIs available
  2. A programmer needs to write custom code to interface with them

If your software vendor does not provide an interface for consuming the data you need to automate, then you’re out of luck. And even if they do, the development costs can eliminate the ROI if the transaction volume isn’t large enough.

RPA tools avoid the API problem by interfacing directly with the application user interface just like a human would do. They use artificial intelligence and machine learning to “watch” the operator perform a task within the application then creates its own program (called a “bot”) to mimic it. This means that:

  1. Bots can do anything a human can do within the application
  2. Users can create a bot without writing code

Practically speaking, an experienced robotic process automation consultant with programming experience is required to roll out an RPA solution enterprise-wide, and most users will only be able to automate small, routine tasks without assistance. Business-critical, high-volume automations will still involve coding. But RPA dramatically reduces the implementation time and avoids the need to retrofit APIs for software applications that were not designed to support them.

Using RPA with OCR Data Capture

UiPath Robotic Process Automation RPA OCROCR Data Capture is one of the most common business processes to automate with RPA. Taking data stored in paper or electronic documents and […]

OCR Consulting Services

OCR Experts for Any Project

Our unique team of OCR experts are equipped to help out with OCR projects of any size or complexity. We have support specialists that can remotely configure desktop solutions in a matter of minutes and expert systems integrators with years of programming, database design, and robotic process automation experience.

Desktop OCR

Batch Document Scanning and OCRUse our online store to order desktop OCR applications and our staff will be happy to answer your setup questions via email or web chat.

Remote configuration and training services using GotoMeeting are available for a low hourly rate.

Batch Scanning & OCR Servers

Data Capture Forms OCRAutomate document scanning and digital document archival processes using zone OCR, barcode recognition, database integration and other technologies.

Small business systems and single document workflows can be setup remotely via GotoMeeting, usually in just a few hours. Chat now if we’re online or leave a message to schedule a consultation.

Data Capture and Forms Processing

Advanced data extraction solutions that can turn the most complex documents into structured data ready for use in business applications. Each member of our data capture consulting team has over 10 years experience designing and implementing advanced OCR solutions.

We are the most experienced system integrator in the US for our flagship data capture platform, ABBYY FlexiCapture. We saw its potential immediately when it was introduced and now over 15 years later it is the leading data capture solution and no team is more experienced than ours at implementing it. We are the ones that other ABBYY integrators call for their most complex implementations.

While we have designed capture solutions for all types of documents, we have particular expertise in the following areas:

    […]

OCR Data Capture

What is OCR Data Capture?

document OCR process automationOCR stands for Optical Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret text on scanned images. When this technology is applied to automating business data entry processes it’s referred to as OCR Data Capture.

Many are familiar with popular desktop OCR applications designed to convert scanned images to editable documents. When this process is applied to specific areas of the document containing data fields it’s called zone OCR. But OCR data capture software is more than just simple zone OCR. Modern applications use some or all of these technologies:

Enterprise data capture systems provide interfaces for scanning, recognition, data verification and export, as well as management and monitoring tools to track large volumes of documents and data through the workflow.

Who can benefit from OCR data capture software?

messy business information made easy with ocr data captureAny organization that collects data from paper documents, or electronic files like PDF and Office documents, can get a very high return on investment by automating the data entry with OCR data capture software.

You do need to have a significant number of documents to […]

Knowledge Base

The SimpleOCR Knowledge Base contains frequently asked questions and answers, technical guides and general information on a broad range of optical character recognition, handprint recognition, data capture, PDF OCR, AP invoice scanning and zone OCR applications.

Contact Us for FREE Consultation on Your OCR Project

Invoice Processing

What is Invoice Processing?

Invoice Processing Software uses OCR data capture technology and page layout analysis to automatically identify the common data elements in an invoice, such as vendor, date, amount, invoice number, line item data, etc.. Invoice Processing applications are built using the same technology as other data extraction applications, but have been specifically configured to recognize Invoices since they are one of the most common documents that companies need to automate.

Who can benefit from Invoice Processing software?

Data Capture Forms OCRAny organization that receives a large number of vendor invoices on paper can benefit from invoice processing technology. The more data from each invoice that you are hand-keying into your accounting software the more benefit you can get from each page you automate.

Accounting firms and other companies that do outsourced accounts payable processing stand to gain the most return on investment from automation. It also has the benefit of on-shoring the data entry, providing additional security and piece of mind to your customers.

A robust OCR invoice processing solution becomes justifiable when you have over 1,000 invoices per month. When dealing with smaller volumes the potential return on investment does not justify investment in an enterprise solution. However, a simple document scanning solution to digitize and store scanned invoices can still provide many benefits.

How does it lower the cost of AP processing?

There are many benefits to OCR invoice systems when it comes to AP processing that give these systems a very high return on investment.

  • Automate data entry tasks
  • Eliminate data entry errors with validation rules and improved UI
  • Automate retrieval of invoices from vendor websites or email
  • Assign Profit Centers and GL Codes based on business rules
  • Match invoices against open POs
  • […]

Business card OCR (BCR)

Networking with the right people is essential for the success of any business. Whether you’re meeting a client to discuss a new project or attending an industry conference to pitch your product, establishing connections matters a lot. And nothing establishes professional contacts better, than a simple exchange of business cards.

Is it possible to keep track of all these pieces of cardboard and fancy paper? Yes, if you have a secretary who does this work for you by filing all your business cards somewhere or manually entering the information into a computer. But what if you could do the entire process yourself instantaneously? Business card OCR (BCR) deals with the problem by handing you an almost instant recognition of the business card, allowing you to extract and upload the data into a database for easier storage and retrieval.

The Neat app transforms your device’s camera into a powerful mobile Business Card scanner that’s always at your side, making it easy to stay organized.

There are dozens of other scanner apps available for iOS and Android, with differing features. To help you choose the one that’s perfect for your needs, we’ve rounded up the best business card scanner apps. Here are just a few of them:




ABBYY Business Card Reader lets you scan and store contact information from business cards in up to 25 languages. The company’s award-winning OCR technology makes for accurate recognition of all contact details, such as names, organizations, phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

The app is smart enough to detect the edges of business cards and automatically crops out any unwanted backgrounds. Any data that’s left unrecognized is highlighted in blue and can be manually corrected. […]

Receipt Scanning

When you’re managing your small business’ finances, filing taxes or just dealing with a results of your shopping spree, it’s necessary to know and record where your money is being spent. But receipts from your purchases may get lost in a sea of other documents and miscellaneous papers.

And when it comes to record keeping, tracking a pile of receipts can become daunting, especially if you travel often for business and need to organize them for expense tracking, or you run your own company and want to write-off all expenses you can.

If you struggle to keep track of your receipts, a receipt scanner can become incredibly useful. Some receipt scanners include online tools and apps that allow you to keep and access your receipts from anywhere, so receipts will be consolidated and you can access them whenever you need them.

At the same time, just having a mobile phone with Scanner App offer a lighter and easier alternative. Receipt Scanner Apps make it easy to scan receipts with any mobile device. Having the ability to transcribe key data and record the information without manual data entry will save you time, and best of all, you can toss those paper receipts.



The Neat app transforms your device’s camera into a powerful mobile receipt scanner that’s always at your side, making it easy to stay organized. The Neat mobile app is especially helpful for tracking expenses while traveling for business or on the road. As soon as you have a receipt or document, just snap a pic and into Neat it goes. At the end of the day, you’ll be able to run an expense report with the click of a button.

Intuit offers a large accounting and record keeping ecosystem Quickbooks. Luckily, […]

Simple Software

SimpleIndex can bring speed and efficiency to your scanning or doc filing no matter the process. Even if all you are doing is hand keying a few basic details about a document, breaking those details into individual indexes and adding tools like drop down choice lists, automatic orientation, and blank page deletion ensure a smoother, more consistent process.

Automation

Here’s where things start to get interesting. From basic tasks like splitting individual documents within at stack of pages by spotting a blank page, a specific mark, or a barcode separator to capturing index data directly from the page or looking up additional details about a document in a database, SimpleIndex has a host of powerful tools to tame your piles of paper or drives full of digital files. Let’s look at a few.

OCR

Optical Character Recognition is the ability to take a scan, which is merely a picture of a page, and turn it into words that the computer can understand and use to index your files. SimpleIndex leverages the power of ABBYY FineReader, recognized as one of the best OCR engines on the market, to accurately capture names, dates, important numbers, document types, and other details about your file. Some products have you set a box and capture whatever information happens to fall in that zone. SimpleIndex takes it further with Dynamic Zone OCR to enable you to set an oversized zone that allows for shifting of the pages between scans, but still captures just the date you need by matching against templates, lists, or even Regular Expressions (RegEx). You can also skip the zones entirely and use the full text of a page to find matches for your index data.

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Document Scanners
& Scanner Parts

Accurate OCR starts with quality images. Efficient OCR starts with fast scanning. Find Document Scanners built for OCR at ScanStore.

Our Team of OCR experts is here to help! SimpleOCR is not just Freeware, we have every kind of OCR solution from PDF Converters to Enterprise Data Capture, OCR Servers and Handprint Recognition for Forms and Surveys. Live chat with an OCR specialist now or Contact Us for a consultation on your OCR project.

SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR Software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications.

SimpleIndex is OCR built for business, offering powerful batch scanning, OCR server, and data capture features with a simple user interface and affordable licensing.

If you like free stuff, freeware versions of our SimpleView Document Viewer (with Tesseract OCR), SimpleCoversheet Bar Code Printer, and SimpleExport CSV to XML Converter are also available.

If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way to do it. The SimpleOCR freeware is 100% free and not limited in any way. Anyone can use SimpleOCR for free–home users, educational institutions, even corporate users.

If your documents have multi-column layouts, non-standard fonts, tables, poor quality or digital camera images, you will not have much success with applications based on free and open source engines like SimpleOCR and Tesseract. You will need a commercial OCR application to get an accurate read. Our OCR Guide compares desktop and server […]

Forms Processing

What is ICR, Survey & Forms Processing?

ICR stands for Intelligent Character Recognition and is the technology that allows software to interpret hand printed text on scanned images.

Data Capture Forms OCRForms Processing Software uses ICR technology to automate data entry tasks involving hand-filled surveys, applications and forms. It provides interfaces for scanning, recognition, data verification and export, as well as management and monitoring tools to track large volumes of documents and data through the workflow.

Forms Processing also includes OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize machine printed text, and OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) for check boxes and multiple choice bubbles.

It is also possible to use these applications to automate data collection from PDF forms, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and other formats used to fill out forms electronically. Many include the ability to publish forms as paper, fillable PDF and web pages simultaneously to distribute and collect data from multiple sources into one dataset.

Who can benefit from forms processing software?

Any organization that collects data on paper-based forms, surveys or applications on a regular basis can get a very high return on investment by automating the data entry with forms processing software.

You do need to have a significant number of forms to justify the expense– at least a hundred forms per month or more depending on how much data is being captured. If the data entry task can be done in under 100 man-hours then it is not a good candidate for automation with ICR software.

Organizations that have many separate departments that collect data on forms can share the budget for forms processing software by re-using it for other projects. Your current project may not be big enough to justify the expense, but when combined with one or two others it would be.

How much do […]

Document Scanning

One Source, Many Solutions

There are many document scanning solutions to choose from. ScanStore offers many of the top document imaging solutions under one virtual roof. ScanStore‘s CDIA+ consultants can work with you to explain the strengths and weaknesses of each option and even provide a demo of the products using samples that you provide.

You’ll find flexibility with each of these products allowing a one-person shop to jump right in, or scale up to enterprise or service bureau proportions. If you need to throw some data capture into the document imaging mix, ScanStore also carries OCR, forms processing and document management tools.

Information and Advice

Take a look at the Scanning Solutions Comparison page to find in-depth information on the features of the available offerings and for more insight in finding the best fit.

And be sure not to miss the detailed comparison of the favorite Batch Scanning solutions in the exclusive Document Scanning Software Review.

What’s Right for You

You want a paperless office and document scanning is part of the path to get you there. Simply buying a scanner and feeding paper into it isn’t going to save you money. Automation of the scanning process is what holds costs down and drives up your Return on Investment.

For example, if an OCR automation costs $3,000 to implement, but by doing so you save a $15/hr employee 10 hours per week of data entry, the feature has paid for itself in 20 weeks.

So how do we automate the data capture? Here are a few possibilities:

  • Full-Page OCR turns a scan into a full-text document you can search

  • Barcodes on each document contain key data like a customer name or invoice number

  • A single […]

ABBYY OCR

ABBYY is one of the leading OCR (Optical Character Recognition) companies in a world. They offer a large variety of document capture and automation products starting with FineReader Pro for individual or small business scale companies and FineReader Corporate. If you need to process many thousands or millions of pages, ABBYY has FineReader Server for full-text OCR and FlexiCapture for OCR data capture. Many companies are using their products for its flexibility and scalability, there is always a way to customize ABBYY OCR products to fit your automation needs.

ABBYY FineReader OCR software helps individuals turn scans of paper documents, PDF files, and digital photographs into searchable and editable formats. Unmatched text recognition accuracy and document conversion capabilities virtually eliminate retyping and reformatting. Intuitive use and one-click automated conversion tasks let you do more with this OCR software in fewer steps. Up to 190 languages supported for text recognition and document conversion – absolute record on OCR/PDF software market!

ABBYY FlexiCapture is a powerful data capture and document processing solution. It is designed to transform streams of documents of any structure and complexity into business-ready data.  Solid recognition technologies, automatic document classification and a highly scalable and customizable architecture, will allow it to help companies and organizations of any size to streamline their business processes, increase efficiency and reduce costs.

ABBYY FineReader Server is powerful server-based OCR software for automated document capture and PDF conversion. Designed for mid- to high-volume batch processing, it enables organizations and scanning service providers to establish cost-efficient processes for converting paper, as well as TIFF, JPEG, and PDF image documents into electronic files suitable for full-text search and long-term digital archiving.

ScanStore and SimpleSoftware are highly experienced integrators of ABBYY […]

Applications

When you scan a document that has text or numeric data on it, you are able to read and understand what is written in the scanned image. However, to a computer, the resulting image file is just as meaningless an assortment of pixels as a landscape photo. In order to transform this information into an editable format that you can search through, copy, and modify without retyping it manually, you will need the an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.

There is a wide variety of OCR software available. While they all share the ability to convert images of machine printed (not handwritten) text or numbers into an editable format, the various software often have different features, accuracy, prices, and language options.

You can find the various types of OCR software with a description of each below.

Users within a single department, working from home or who have a small business can simply scan their documents to a folder that is shared to everyone. In this “ad-hoc” scenario you only need some basic document scanning software to simplify and bring consistency to your filing system.

If you want to move to the next level, there are Desktop Document Management options that provide an all-in-one means for capture, storage, search and retrieval of documents. Additionally, they provide security, advanced capabilities and ease of use above that of the ad-hoc methods

And let’s not forget cloud-based options that alleviate the need to maintain storage servers or keep software up to date.

Need a simple, no frills OCR solution without spending hundreds of dollars on a professional software package? Look no further. There is a no cost, donation optional, OCR freeware solution […]

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